Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

The Tablet's Bobbie Mickens attends his first traditional Latin Mass. It makes him dizzy

In this week's Tablet, Robert Mickens announces that he has been to his first full celebration of the traditional Latin Mass. Yes, that's right: the Rome correspondent of a Catholic magazine, who has spent years sniping at lovers of the older form of the Roman rite of Mass, has only just got round to attending one.

"Until recently I had only seen portions of the extraordinary form," he reveals. Meaning what? Clips of it on YouTube? Incredible: the guy holds forth about the retrograde nature of Benedict XVI's reforms, even has the nerve to claim that the Holy Father is "not a trained liturgist", and then it turns out that his own experience of the Mass of the Ages has been restricted to "portions".

Until the Sunday before last, that is, when Bobbie took himself along to Santissima Trinita dei Pellegrini in Rome for Mass celebrated by the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter. The verdict? The music was "gorgeous and spirituality moving, at least for meditation. But the rest of the liturgy was not. The church was half full mostly with regulars who had their own missals – or rosaries. Without the black book it was impossible fully to participate."

Sounds to me like Mickens hadn't bothered to acquire, or borrow, a "black book" (or even the Mass in a pamphlet) before turning up. Certainly his description of "lots of criss-crossing in the sanctuary, bowing, a constant moving of books … distracting and even dizzying" implies that he hadn't done much homework.

Poor dizzy Bobbie. Still, I suppose we should be grateful that he wasn't moved to tears.